Category: People

I lost a hero today. In the past couple of weeks the internet has exploded with grief over lost controversial figures and then poured out remembrances of great entertainers. Today I lost a hero of mine.

“The main thing is never to get discouraged at the slowness of people or results. People may not be articulate or active, but even so, we do not ever know the result, or the effect on the souls. That is not for us to know. We can only go ahead and work with happiness at what God sends us to do.” — Dorothy Day, from The Reckless Way of Love

“Near the end of (Dorothy) Day’s life, Robert Coles asked her if she had any plans to write a memoir. She was a gorgeous and prolific writer, so it was a natural question to ask. She told Coles that she had once thought of doing that, and had pulled out a piece of paper and wrote ‘A Life Remembered.’ Then, ‘I just sat there and thought of our Lord, and his visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life’ She felt no need to write anything.

What must such peace and tranquility feel like?” — David Brooks, The Second Mountain

Peterson saw pastors moving from church to church, often in exhaustion, and identified the problem—a sense of pastor as program director for a church that often viewed the gospel as a way to success, or at least avoidance of suffering. His answer was a paradigm shift, but not the kind found in ministry self-help bestsellers.

“The paradigm shift is not accomplished by a change of schedule, attending a ministry workshop, or getting fitted in a new suit of spiritual disciplines—although any or all of these might be useful,” he wrote. “It is theimaginationthat must shift, the huge interior of our lives that determines the angle and scope of our vocation. A long, prayerful soak in the biblical imaginations of Ezekiel and St. John, those antitheses to flat-earth programmatics, is a place to start.” From this article.